Thursday, June 2, 2016

Poetry and Psychotherapy

While I have two people in my Writing Poetic Memoir class with Psychology backgrounds, one faculty and one student, I am reminded on how the textbook I am using, the approach I have, and my own writing shows the deep connection between poetic memoir and psychotherapy--including the self.

The two poets I am focusing my reading on, Leslie Scalapino and Maggie Nelson, are true examples of how pschotheraputic poetics truly transforms. The sentence changes the person writing the sentence.

If there is anything about a sentence is that it is never a prison, but a measure to move into another measure of movement.

The fragmented sentence is the anti-Patriarchal response to order, as well as the representation of the fragmented past, as every history is placed down.

When Sondra moved in I became fascinated with how psychology works. I read through books, listened to her discuss, and this all helped shape my understanding for understanding. She would say, "Just remember: you are not a therapist." That is true. My poems are models, though, for understanding, exploration, without any answer.

That is why poems do not have answers. They need to remain sites for resistance, for survival.